QA project

[vaughanmk]

I work in a peds ER and need to develop a new small QA project. I need suggestions, what projects do you do? Examples in my department include blood glocuse monitoring ( the information the nurse inputs into the monitor), initial and discharge pain scales, rapid strep accuracy vs culture, blood culture false positives. This needs to be a montly project so I don't want to spendmore than a few hours each month collecting the information. Thanks for any suggestions.

[Daytonite, BSN, RN]

What kind of information isn't getting charted? This is easy to check with the HIM department who does chart checks. Look through your policy and procedure manual and see if there is some particular procedure that strikes you that may not be followed or that you believe may need updating. Develop a check sheet and test for it. I was on a QA committee and this is how we chose projects.

[classicdame, MSN, EdD]

you already have good topics. What you need is help in collecting and reporting data. Someone in Risk Management, Quality, the Safety Officer or even the Financial officer should have software on this. Or get a good statistics book. The real questions come down to: what is the problem, what do you propose to make it better, how did you implement your plan, and what were the results?

For instance, we decided to initiate a rapid response team two years ago. We got data on how many and what kind of codes were called, who responded, how much hospital FTE's were involved----. Then we created the team and kept the same data for several months. Result: Unsuccessful cardiac codes were reduced by > 80%!!!